Fear and Loathing in New Vegas
by Lee Atwater
Summary: Courier Ramona Duke and Doctor Gannon go a little gonzo. We can't stop here. This is deathclaw country.


We were somewhere around Novac, on the edge of the desert, when the chems began to take hold. I remember seeing flashing lights and then an enormous lizard, looming out of nowhere. My God, I thought. The geckos around here are monstrous.

"Faster, my good man!" I said to my personal physician, Doctor Gannon, who was driving the motorcycle while I cowered in the sidecar. "What sort of horrifying freak trip have they sent us on?"

"As your doctor, I advise you to take some more Psycho and think about grapefruit," he said, shielding his eyes from the sun.

We'd been given five hundred caps by some sleazebag named Cachino to go watch a bunch of Jet-addled Fiends race around in the desert. Most of it was already spent on extremely dangerous chems – half a dozen vials of Psycho, a small bag of Jet inhalers, five bottles of absinthe, a canister of Buffout, enough Med-X to knock down a colony of fire ants, a few Mentats for good luck, and of course, the various and sundry liquers and potions that I'd bought from Cass.

The others had never understood why Doctor Gannon and I occasionally felt the need to get high as fuck and roam around the Wasteland inflicting mayhem and madness on good and evil alike. Neither did we, for that matter. Maybe it was some sort of shared insanity from our childhoods, maybe there was something in the water in northern California that made us turn into wolfmen and howl at the moon twice a year, or maybe we were just wrapped up so tightly in our work that when we cut loose, we did so in an explosion of violence and chems that would put the worst of Fiends to shame.

Not that our friends didn't sympathize. Or they just wanted us out of their hair for a while. There could be no other explanation for why Veronica and Raul presented me with an old Black Lightning last week, prettied up with a fission battery, a new paint job and a customized sidecar with a semi-automatic turret attachment. God bless those little bastards, they knew just what I wanted for my birthday.

My thoughts were interrupted when Doctor Gannon hit the brakes, nearly sending us into a tailspin. When we came to a halt, I hopped out of the sidecar, still woozy from the Psycho and the spinning, intent on throttling that albino nutjob that I traveled with. Could he have wanted me _dead?_ Could he have taken a contract out on me? Benny, that smug bastard, reincarnated as a Judas!

"We can't stop here," I shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders. "This is deathclaw country!"

"A hitchhiker," he explained, pointing at a slight figure by the side of the road. "My animal instincts say he brings good luck. We should take him with us."

"Nothing in this damned Wasteland is ever good luck," I muttered, but resisted the urge to snap his neck and suck out the juices when he gestured to the traveler to join us.

"Greetings and salutations!" he called to the man, a flushed ginger who couldn't have been more than twenty. "I am Doctor Arcade Gannon, and this is my companion, Ramona Duke, lately of the Vault-Tec Corporation. And today happens to be your lucky day. We're headed to the city, where a young man like you can find incredible opportunities in the field of not being eaten by scorpions if you want to join us. All we ask is that you not disturb our supplies, and that you allow us to use you as a human shield in case of ghoul attack. Now where do you want to go today?"

"Gomorrah," said the man, blushing under his sunburn.

"An excellent choice. They have something for everyone. Well, almost everyone. They couldn't provide Ramona here with a selection of shirtless men willing to re-enact Boulder City with a paint gun full of marinara sauce the last time we visited, but she's going to try again this year." Doctor Gannon companionably put his arm around the now-terrified man's shoulders and led him to the motorcycle. "We're not the monsters we appear to be, by the way, simply travelers of the mental geosphere. You can trust us. We're _writers_."

Three days later, I awoke in a hotel room covered in feathers and something horribly sticky that may or may not have had a biological origin. No marinara, though. Disappointing.

"Arcade?" I called blearily. "Did we ever make it to the race?"

Doctor Gannon stumbled into my field of vision. It looked like he'd been trying to finger paint with blood again. "No, we remembered that none of the cars here have wheels. You did steal a Fiend's headdress, though, and threatened to cut off his ears if he ever tried to listen to the radio again. Then we came back to Vegas and did a bunch of Jet in Vault 21 until they set dogs on us, and then we came back to Gomorrah. You tried to leave earlier, for more absinthe, but there's some sort of NCR brass meeting downstairs."

The NCR? Those bureaucratic swine! They couldn't just stay in California. No, they had to invade my little slice of paradise. If I went downstairs now, they'd know I was in a chem haze and pounce on me, dragging me off for target practice. Drunk and disorderly, that's us. Now I'm stuck in a hotel room with a madman who may or may not have just murdered someone for artistic sensibilities, without any absinthe and a dwindling supply of Buffout. And I never did my writing for the Omertas. Cachino would have me eaten alive by molerats.

"Are you covered in blood?" I asked Doctor Gannon, sifting through our chem pack. "More importantly, where are the rest of our supplies?" A shifting motion from the couch caught my eye. The ginger! Had he followed us back? Was he trailing us? Was he a very clever NCR ranger who had stolen all of our Psycho, just so he could trick us into coming close enough to gnaw our faces off?

But no. He was passed out. Passed out and wearing only boxer shorts and nipple tassels. "I found him down in the casino," Doctor Gannon admitted. "He said he had a headache so I gave him a little bit of Med-X. Next thing I knew he'd used all our Psycho and drank an entire bottle of olive oil straight."

"_All _of our Psycho?" I snarled. "Lies! No one could do that and survive, other than us. Is he some sort of deranged android who runs on stolen drugs?"

"I don't know! He said he was a missionary! He started preaching something in a weird language, then handed me a knife and told me to write words of salvation on his back." That explained the blood.

"Well, let's get him into the bathtub and pour some ice water onto him until he wakes up or dies," I said confidently. "And if he dies, you're taking him out to the dumpster. I'm not carrying a bloody corpse through a room full of NCR politicians. They might suspect I'm drunk."

When we tried to pick up the man to move him to the bathtub, we discovered a bigger problem.

"Shitfuck!" I said, dropping our unconscious guest to the floor, pointing at the bull tattoo across his chest. "Doctor Gannon! Do you know what this means, man? He's a legionary! When he wakes up, he'll run back to Caesar and claim that we drugged him and forced all manners of perversions on him!"

"Did you force any perversions on him?" Doctor Gannon asked, frowning. "I didn't even think about that. You know I like brunettes."

"It doesn't matter! He'll say that we did! And that bald bastard already hates us. Remember our last vacation? We sailed up the Colorado naked and yelled at his camp for four hours before you fell in the lake while taking a piss and I had to kill all those mirelurks with a sledgehammer. We had assassins for months after that. He'll gut us for this!"

"Right!" my friend said, eyes narrowing. "Right. Then we'll turn him in to the NCR downstairs. They might give us some caps, or more alcohol."

"Are you utterly insane? Those pigs will blame us if anything goes wrong. They'll say we led him here and hang us as collaborators," I snapped.

"Then what should we do?"

"Leave him in the hotel room," I decided. "He's won it, by right of combat. We need to take five showers apiece, gather up the rest of our chems, leave this place forever, burn it to the ground with everyone inside, then go to that diner west of town and order an enormous stack of waffles. With butter. We'll eat it with our fingers. Boone should be coming to get us in a few days, and I dread the comedown when he makes us sober up this time. We might as well have some fun."

Our week was almost up, and I'd already forgotten almost everything we did. In a few days I'd have to go back to being The Courier, Savior of the Mojave, and leave my hedonistic alter ego at the door for the good of all mankind. Politics, fucking politics. I'd have to pick a side soon. I'd probably end up picking myself, for no other reason than having pissed off everyone else. But I'd done it to myself the moment I decided to come back from the dead. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

It would be six months before we'd be allowed to go on another rampage. Maybe next time we could paint a picture of Mr. House getting a blowjob from a Securitron, on the side of the Hoover Dam, in stolen condiments. Just one great big fuck you to everyone in this filthy desert, everyone who didn't believe in our noble mission of getting as messed up as possible. No one here wants to have fun anymore.


End file.
